When Time Began (Book V)
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Zecharia Sitchin
Zecharia Sitchin (1920-2010), an eminent Orientalist and biblical scholar, was born in Russia and grew up in Palestine, where he acquired a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew, other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of the Near East. A graduate of the University of London with a degree in economic history, he worked as a journalist and editor in Israel for many years prior to undertaking his life’s work--The Earth Chronicles. One of the few scholars able to read the clay tablets and interpret ancient Sumerian and Akkadian, Sitchin based The Earth Chronicles series on the texts and pictorial evidence recorded by the ancient civilizations of the Near East. His books have been widely translated, reprinted in paperback editions, converted to Braille for the blind, and featured on radio and television programs.
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When Time Began (Book V) - Zecharia Sitchin
1
THE CYCLES OF TIME
It is said that Augustine of Hippo, the bishop in Roman Carthage (A.D. 354–430), the greatest thinker of the Christian Church in its early centuries, who fused the religion of the New Testament with the Platonistic tradition of Greek philosophy, was asked, What is time?
His answer was, If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain what it is to him who asks me, I do not know.
Time is essential to Earth and all that is upon it, and to each one of us as individuals; for, as we know from our own experience and observations, what separates us from the moment we are born and the moment when we cease to live is TIME.
Though we know not what Time is, we have found ways to measure it. We count our lifetimes in years, which—come to think of it—is another way of saying orbits,
for that is what a year
on Earth is: the time it takes Earth, our planet, to complete one orbit around our star, the Sun. We do not know what time is, but the way we measure it makes us wonder: would we live longer, would our life cycle be different, were we to live on another planet whose year
is longer? Would we be immortal
if we were to be upon a Planet of millions of years
—as, in fact, the Egyptian pharaohs believed that they would be, in an eternal Afterlife, once they joined the gods on that Planet of millions of years
?
Indeed, are there other planets out there,
and, even more so, planets on which life as we know it could have evolved—or is our planetary system unique, and life on Earth unique, and we, humankind, are all alone—or did the pharaohs know what they were speaking of in their Pyramid Texts?
Look up skyward and count the stars,
Yahweh told Abraham as He made the covenant with him. Man has looked skyward from time immemorial, and has been wondering whether there are others like him out there, upon other earths. Logic, and mathematical probability, dictate a Yes answer; but it was only in 1991 that astronomers, for the first time, it was stressed, actually found other planets orbiting other suns elsewhere in the universe.
The first discovery, in July 1991, turned out not to have been entirely correct. It was an announcement by a team of British astronomers that, based on observations over a five-year period, they concluded that a rapidly spinning star identified as Pulsar 1829–10 has a planet-sized companion
about ten times the size of Earth. Pulsars are assumed to be the extraordinarily dense cores of stars that have collapsed for one reason or another. Spinning madly, they emit pulses of radio energy in regular bursts, many times per second. Such pulses can be monitored by radio telescopes; by detecting a cyclic fluctuation, the astronomers surmised that a planet that orbits Pulsar 1829–10 once every six months can cause and explain the fluctuation.
As it turned out, the British astronomers admitted several months later that their calculations were imprecise and, therefore, they could not stand by their conclusion that the pulsar, some 30,000 light-years away, had a planetary satellite. By then, however, an American team had made a similar discovery pertaining to a much closer pulsar, identified as PSR 1257 + 12—a collapsed sun only 1,300 light-years away from us. It exploded, astronomers estimated, about a mere billion years ago; and it definitely has two, and perhaps three, orbiting planets. The two certain ones were orbiting their sun at about the same distance as Mercury does our Sun; the possible third planet orbits its sun at about the same distance as Earth does our Sun.
The discovery stirred speculation that planetary systems not only were fairly common but also could occur under diverse circumstances,
wrote John Noble Wilford in The New York Times of January 9, 1992; scientists said it was most unlikely that planets orbiting pulsars could be hospitable to life; but the findings encouraged astronomers, who this fall will begin a systematic survey of the heavens for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Were, then, the pharaohs right?
Long before the pharaohs and the Pyramid Texts, an ancient civilization—Man's first known one—possessed an advanced cosmogony. Six thousand years ago, in ancient Sumer, what astronomers have discovered in the 1990s was already known; not only the true nature and composition of our Solar System (including the farthest out planets), but also the notion that there are other solar systems in the universe, that their stars (suns
) can collapse or explode, that their planets can be thrown off course—that Life, indeed, can thus be carried from one star system to another. It was a detailed cosmogony, spelled out in writing.
One long text, written on seven tablets, has reached us primarily in its later Babylonian version. Called the Epic of Creation and known by its opening words Enuma elish. it was publicly read during the New Year festival that started on the first day of the month Nissan, coinciding with the first day of spring.
Outlining the process by which our own Solar System came into being, the long text described how the Sun (Apsu
) and its messenger Mercury (Mummu
) were first joined by an olden planet called Tiamat; how a pair of planets Venus and Mars—(Lahamu
and Lahmu
) then coalesced between the Sun and Tiamat, followed by two pairs beyond Tiamat—Jupiter and Saturn (Kishar
and Anshar
) and Uranus and Neptune (Anu
and Nudimmud
), the latter two being planets unknown to modern astronomers until 1781 and 1846 respectively—yet known, and described, by the Sumerians millennia earlier. As those newly-created celestial gods
tugged and pulled at each other. some of them sprouted satellites—moonlets. Tiamat, in the midst of that unstable planetary family, sprouted eleven satellites; one of them, Kingu,
grew so much in size that it began to assume the aspects of a celestial god,
a planet, on its own. Modern astronomers were totally ignorant of the possibility that a planet could have many moons until Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter in 1609, with the aid of a telescope; but the Sumerians were aware of the phenomenon millennia earlier.
Into that unstable solar system, according to the millennia-old Epic of Creation, there appeared an invader from outer space—another planet; a planet not born into the family of Apsu, but one that had belonged to some other star's family and that was thrust off to wander in space. Millennia before modern astronomy learned of pulsars and collapsing stars, the Sumerian cosmogony had already envisioned other planetary systems and collapsing or exploding stars that threw off their planets. And so, Enuma elish related, one such cast-off planet, reaching the outskirts of our own Solar System, began to be drawn into its midst (Fig. 1).
As it passed by the outer planets, it caused changes that account for many of the enigmas that still baffle modern astronomy—such as the cause for Uranus's tilt on its side, the retrograde orbit of Neptune's largest moon, Triton, or what pulled Pluto from its place as a moonlet to become a planet with an odd orbit. The more the invader was drawn into the Solar System's center, the more was it forced onto a collision course with Tiamat, resulting in the Celestial Battle.
In the series of collisions, with the invader's satellites repeatedly smashing into Tiamat, the olden planet split in two. One half of it was smashed into bits and pieces to become the Asteroid Belt (between Mars and Jupiter) and various comets; the other half, wounded but intact, was thrust into a new orbit to become the planet we call Earth (Ki
in Sumerian); shunted with it was Tiamat's largest satellite, to become Earth's Moon. The invader itself was caught into permanent orbit around the Sun, to become our Solar System's twelfth member (Sun, Moon, and ten planets). The Sumerians called it Nibiru—Planet of the Crossing.
The Babylonians renamed it Marduk in honor of their national god. It was during the Celestial Battle, the ancient epic asserted, that the seed of life,
brought by Nibiru from elsewhere, was passed to Earth.
Fig 1
Philosophers and scientists, contemplating the universe and offering modern cosmogonies, invariably end up discussing Time. Is Time a dimension in itself, or perhaps the only true dimension in the universe? Does Time only flow forward, or can it flow backward? Is the present part of the past or the beginning of the future? And, not least of all, did Time have a beginning? For, if so, will it have an end? If the universe has existed forever, without a beginning and thus without an end, is Time too without a beginning and without an end—or did the universe indeed have a beginning, perhaps with the Big Bang assumed by many astrophysicists, in which case Time began when the universe began?
Those who conceived the amazingly accurate Sumerian cosmogony also believed in a Beginning (and thus, inexorably, in an End). It is clear that they conceived of Time as a measure, the pacesetter from, and the marker of, a beginning in a celestial saga; for the very first word of the ancient Epic of Creation, Enuma, means When:
Enuma elish fa nabu shamamu
When in the heights heaven had not been named
Shaplitu ammatum shuma fa zakrat
And below, firm ground (Earth) had not been called
It must have taken great scientific minds to conceive of a primordial phase when naught existed but primordial Apsu, their begetter; Mummu, and Tiamat
—when Earth had not yet come into being; and to realize that for Earth and all upon it the big bang
was not when the universe or even the Solar System was created, but the event of the Celestial Battle. It was then, at that moment, that Time began for Earth—the moment when, separated from the half of Tiamat that became the Asteroid Belt (heaven
), Earth was shunted to its own new orbit and could start counting the years, the months, the days, the nights—to measure Time.
This scientific view, central to ancient cosmogony, religion, and mathematics, was expressed in many other Sumerian texts besides the Epic of Creation. A text treated by scholars as the myth
of Enki and the world order,
but which is literally the autobiographical tale by Enki, the Sumerian god of science, describes the moment when—When—Time began to tick for Earth:
In the days of yore,
when heaven was separated from Earth.
In the nights of yore,
when heaven was separated from Earth . . .
Another text, in words often repeated on Sumerian clay tablets, conveyed the notion of Beginning by listing the many aspects of evolution and civilization that had not yet come into being before the crucial event. Before then, the text asserted, the name of Man had not yet been called
and needful things had not yet been brought into being.
All those developments started to take place only after heaven had been moved away from Earth, after Earth had been separated from heaven.
It is not surprising that the same notions of Time's beginnings also ruled Egyptian beliefs, whose development was subsequent to those of the Sumerians. We read in the Pyramid Texts (para. 1466) the following description of the Beginning of Things:
When heaven had not yet come into existence,
When men had not yet come into existence,
When gods had not yet been born,
When death had not yet come into existence . . .
This knowledge, universal in antiquity and stemming from the Sumerian cosmogony, was echoed in the very first verse of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible:
In the beginning
Elohim created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void
and darkness was upon the face of Tehom,
and the wind of the Lord swept over its waters.
It is now well established that this biblical tale of creation was based on Mesopotamian texts such as Enuma elish, with Tehom meaning Tiamat, the wind
meaning satellites,
in Sumerian, and heaven,
described as the hammered out bracelet,
the Asteroid Belt. The Bible, however, is clearer regarding the moment of the Beginning as far as Earth was concerned; the biblical version picks up the Mesopotamian cosmogony only from the point of the separation of the Earth from the Shama' im, the Hammered Bracelet, as a result of the breakup of Tiamat.
For Earth, Time began with the Celestial Battle.
The Mesopotamian tale of creation begins with the formation of our Solar System and the appearance of Nibiru/Marduk at a time when the planetary orbits were not yet fixed and stable. It ends by attributing to Nibiru/Marduk the current shape of our Solar System, whereby each planet (celestial god
) received its assigned place (station
), orbital path (destiny
), and rotation, even its moons. Indeed, as a large planet that encompasses by its orbit all the other planets, one who crosses the heavens and surveys the regions,
it was considered to have become the one that stabilized the Solar System:
He established the station of Nibiru,
to determine their heavenly bands,
that none might transgress or fall short . . .
He established for the planets their
sacred heavens,
He keeps hold on their ways,
determines their courses.
Thus, states Enuma elish (Tablet V, line 65), He created the Heaven and the Earth
—the very same words used in the Book of Genesis.
The Celestial Battle eliminated Tiamat as a member of the old Solar System, thrust half of it into a new orbit to become Planet Earth, retained the Moon as a vital component of the new Solar System, detached Pluto into an independent orbit, and added Nibiru as the twelfth member of the New Order in our heavens. For Earth and its inhabitants, those were to become the elements that determined Time.
To this day, the key role that the number twelve played in Sumerian science and daily life (in line with the twelve-member Solar System) has accompanied us throughout the millennia. They divided the day
(from sunset to sunset) into twelve double-hours,
retained into modern times in the twelve-hour clock and the twenty-four-hour day. The twelve months in the year are still with us, as are the twelve houses of the zodiac. This celestial number had many other expressions, as in the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve apostles of Jesus.
The Sumerian mathematical system is called sexagesimal, i.e. based on sixty
rather than on 100 as in the metric system (in which one meter is equal to 100 centimeters). Among the advantages of the sexagesimal system was its divisibility into twelve. The sexagesimal system progressed by alternately multiplying six and ten: starting with six, multiplying six by ten (6 × 10 = 60), then by six to obtain 360—the number applied by the Sumerians to the circle and still used both in geometry and astronomy. That, in turn, was multiplied by ten, to obtain the sar (ruler, lord
), the number 3,600, which was written by inscribing a great circle, and so on.
The sar, 3,600 Earth-years, was the orbital period of Nibiru around the Sun; for anyone on Nibiru, it was just one Nibiru-year. According to the Sumerians, there were indeed others, intelligent beings, on Nibiru, evolving there well ahead of hominids on Earth. The Sumerians called them Anunnaki, literally meaning Those who from Heaven to Earth came.
Sumerian texts repeatedly asserted that the Anunnaki had come to Earth from Nibiru in great antiquity; and that when they had come here, they counted time not in Earth terms but in terms of Nibiru's orbit. The unit of that Divine Time, a year of the gods, was the sar.
Texts known as the Sumerian King Lists, which describe the first settlements of the Anunnaki on Earth, list the governorships of the first ten Anunnaki leaders before the Deluge in sars, the 3,600 Earth-year cycles. From the first landing to the Deluge, according to those texts, 120 sars had passed: Nibiru orbited the Sun one hundred and twenty times, which equals 432,000 Earth-years. It was on the one hundred twentieth orbit that the gravitational pull of Nibiru was such that it caused the ice sheet that accumulated over Antarctica to slip off into the southern oceans, creating the immense tidal wave that engulfed the Earth—the great flood or Deluge, recorded in the Bible from much earlier and much more detailed Sumerian sources.
Legends and ancient lore gave this number, 432,000, cyclical significance beyond the land then called Sumer. In Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, searching for a point where myth and science join,
concluded that 432,000 was a number of significance from old.
Among the examples cited by them was the Teutonic and Norse tale of the Valhalla, the mythic abode of the slain warriors who, on the Day of Judgment, will march out of the Valhalla's gates to fight at the side of the god Odin or Woden against the giants. They would exit through the Valhalla's 540 doors; eight hundred warriors would march out of each. The total number of warrior-heroes, Santillana and von Dechend pointed out, was thus 432,000. This number,
they continued, "must have had a very ancient meaning, for it is also the number of syllables in the Rigveda," the Sacred Book of Verses
in the Sanskrit language, in which have been recorded the Indo-European tales of gods and heroes. Four hundred thirty-two thousand, the two authors wrote, "goes back to the basic figure 10,800, the number of stanzas in the Rigveda, with 40 syllables to a stanza" (10,800 × 40 = 432,(00).
Hindu traditions clearly associated the number 432,000 with the yugas or Ages that Earth and Mankind had experienced. Each caturyuga (great yuga
) was divided into four yugas or Ages whose diminishing lengths were expressions of 432,000: first the Fourfold Age (4 × 432,000 = 1,728,000 years) which was the Golden Age, then the Threefold Age of Knowledge (3 × 432,000 = 1,296,000 years), followed by the Double or Twofold Age of Sacrifice (2 × 432,000 = 864,000 years); and finally our present era, the Age of Discord which will last a mere 432,000 years. All in all these Hindu traditions envision ten eons, paralleling the ten Sumerian rulers of the pre-Diluvial era but expanding the overall time span to 4,320,000 years.
Further expanded, such astronomical numbers based on 432,000 were applied in Hindu religion and traditions to the kalpa, the Day
of the Lord Brahma. It was defined as an eon comprising twelve million devas (Divine Years
). Each Divine Year in turn equaled 360 Earthyears. Therefore, a Day of the Lord Brahma
equaled 4,320,000,000 Earth-years—a time span very much like modern estimates of the age of our Solar System—arrived at by multiplications of 360 and 12.
4,320,000,000 is, however, a thousandfold great yugas—a fact brought out in the eleventh century by the Arab mathematician Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, who explained that the kalpa consisted of 1,000 cycles of caturyugas. One could thus paraphrase the mathematics of the Hindu celestial calendar by stating that in the eyes of the Lord Brahma, a thousand cycles were but a single day. This brings to mind the enigmatic statement in Psalms (90:4) regarding the Divine Day of the biblical Lord:
A thousand years, in thy eyes,
[are] as a day past, gone by.
The statement has traditionally been viewed as merely symbolic of the Lord's eternity. But in view of the numerous traces of Sumerian data in the Book of Psalms (as well as in other parts of the Hebrew Bible), a precise mathematical formula might well have been intended—a formula echoed also in Hindu traditions.
The Hindu traditions were brought to the Indian subcontinent by Aryan
migrants from the shores of the Caspian Sea, cousins of the Indo-Europeans who were the Hittites of Asia Minor (today's Turkey) and of the Hurrians of the upper Euphrates River, through whom Sumerian knowledge and beliefs were transmitted to the Indo-Europeans. The Aryan migrations are believed to have taken place in the second millennium B.C. and the Vedas were held to be not of human origin,
having been composed by the gods themselves in a previous age. In time the various components of the Vedas and the auxiliary literature that derived from them (the Mantras, Brahmanas, etc.) were augmented by the non-Vedic Puranas (Ancient Writings
) and the great epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In them, ages deriving from multiples of 3,600 also predominate; thus, according to the Vishnu Purana, the day that Krishna shall depart from Earth will be the first day of the age of Kali; it will continue for 360,000 years of mortals.
This is a reference to the concept that the Kaliyuga, the present age, is divided to a dawn or morning twilight
of 100 divine years that equal 36,000 Earth or mortal
years, the age itself (1,000 divine years equaling 360,000 Earth-years), and a dusk or evening twilight
of a final 100 divine years (36,000 mortal-years), adding up to 1,200 divine or 432,000 Earth-years.
The depth of such widespread beliefs in a Divine Cycle of 432,000 years, equaling 120 orbits of 3,600 Earth-years each of Nibiru, makes one wonder whether they represent merely arithmetical sleights of hand—or, in some unknown way, a basic natural or astronomical phenomenon recognized in antiquity by the Anunnaki. We have shown in The 12th Planet, the first book of The Earth Chronicles series, that the Deluge was a global calamity anticipated by the Anunnaki, resulting from the gravitational pull of the nearing Nibiru on the unstable ice sheet over Antarctica. The event brought the last ice age to an abrupt end circa 13,000 years ago, and was thus recorded in Earth's cycles as a major geological and climatic change.
Such changes, the longest being the geological epochs, have been verified through studies of the Earth's surface and oceanic sediments. The last geological epoch, called the Pleistocene, began about 2,500,000 years ago and ended at the time of the Deluge; it was the time span during which hominids evolved, the Anunnaki came to Earth, and Man, Homo sapiens, was brought into being. And it was during the Pleistocene that a cycle of approximately 430,000 years was identified in marine sediments. According to a series of studies by teams of geologists led by Madeleine Briskin of the University of Cincinnati, sea level changes and deep-sea climatic records show a 430,000-year quasi-periodic cyclicity.
Such a cyclic periodicity conforms with the Astronomical Theory of climatic modulations that takes into account changes due to obliquity (the Earth's tilt), precession (the slight orbital retardation), and eccentricity (the shape of the elliptical orbit). Milutin Milankovitch, who outlined the theory in the 1920s, estimated that the resulting grand periodicity was 413,000 years. His, and the more recent Briskin cycle, almost conform to the Sumerian cycle of 432,000 Earth-years attributed to Nibiru's effects: the convergence of orbits and perturbations and climatic cycles.
The myth
of Divine Ages thus appears to be based on scientific facts.
The element of Time features in the ancient records, both Sumerian and biblical, not only as a point of beginning—When.
The process of creation is at once linked to the measurement of time, measurements that in turn are linked to determinable celestial motions. The destruction of Tiamat and the ensuing creation of the Asteroid Belt and Earth required, according to the Mesopotamian version, two return orbits of the Celestial Lord (the invading Nibiru/Marduk). In the biblical version, it took the Lord two divine days
to complete the task; hopefully, even Fundamentalists will by now agree that these were not day and night days as we now know them, for the two days
occurred before Earth had yet come into existence (and besides, let them heed the Psalmist's statement of the Lord's day being equal to a thousand years or so). The Mesopotamian version clearly measures Creation Time or Divine Time by the passages of Nibiru, in an orbit equaling 3,600 Earth-years.
Before that ancient story of Creation shifts to the newly formed Earth and evolution upon it, it is a tale of stars, planets, celestial orbits; and the Time it deals with is Divine Time. But once the focus shifts to Earth and ultimately to Man upon it, the scale of Time also shifts—to an Earthly Time—to a scale appropriate not only to Man's abode but also to one that Mankind could grasp and measure: Day, Month, Year.
Even as we consider these familiar elements of Earthly Time, it should be borne in mind that all three of them are also expressions of celestial motions—cyclical motions—involving a complex correlation between Earth, Moon, and Sun. We now know that the daily sequence of light and darkness that we call a Day (of twenty-four hours) results from the fact that Earth turns on its axis, so that as it is lit by the Sun's rays on one side, the other side is in darkness. We now know that the Moon is always there, even when unseen, and that it wanes and waxes not because it disappears but because, depending on the Earth-Moon-Sun positions (Fig. 2) we see the Moon fully lighted by the Sun's rays, or fully obscured by the Earth's shadow, or in phases in between. It is this threefold relationship that extends the actual orbital period of the Moon around the Earth from about 27.3 days (the sidereal month
) to the observed cycle of about 29.53 days (the synodic month
) and the phenomenon of the reappearing or New Moon with all its calendrical and religious implications. And the year or Solar Year, we now of course know, is the period it takes the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun, our star.
Figure 2
But such basic truths regarding the causes of the Earthly Time cycles of day, month, year are not self-evident and required advanced scientific knowledge to be realized. For the better part of two thousand years it was believed, for example, that the day–night cycle resulted from the circling of Earth by the Sun; for from the time of Ptolemy of Alexandria (second century A.D.) until the Copernican Revolution
in 1543 A.D., the unquestioned belief was that the Sun, the Moon, and the visible planets were circling the Earth, which was the center of the universe. The suggestion by Nicolaus Copernicus that the Sun was at the center and that the Earth was just another celestial body orbiting it, like any other planet, was so revolutionary scientifically and heretical religiously that he delayed writing his great astronomical work (De revolutionibus Coelestium; English translation, On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres) and his friends delayed printing it until his very last day, May 24, 1543.
Yet it is evident that in earlier times Sumerian knowledge included familiarity with the triple Earth-Moon-Sun relationship. The Enuma elish text, describing the four phases of the Moon, clearly explained them in terms of the position of the Moon vis-a-vis the Sun as it (the Moon) circled the Earth: a full moon at midmonth as it stood still opposite the Sun,
and its waning at month's end as it stood against the Sun
(see Fig. 2). These motions were attributed to the destinies
(orbits) that the Celestial Lord (Nibiru) gave Earth and its moon as a result of the Celestial Battle:
The Moon he caused to shine,
to it the night entrusting;
In the night the days to signal
he appointed it, [saying:]
Monthly, without cease, form designs with a crown.
At the month's very start, rising over the Earth,
thou shalt have luminous horns to signify six days,
reaching a crescent on the seventh day.
At mid month stand still opposite the Sun;
it shall overtake thee at the horizon.
Then diminish thy crown and regress in light,
at that time approaching the Sun;
And on the 30th day thou shalt stand against the Sun.
I have appointed thee a destiny; follow its path.
Thus,
the ancient text concludes, did the Celestial Lord appoint the days and establish the precincts of night and day.
(It is noteworthy that the biblical and Jewish tradition, according to which the twenty-four-hour day begins at sundown the previous evening—"and it was evening and it was morning, one day"—is already expressed in the Mesopotamian texts. In the words of Enuma elish, the Moon was "appointed in the night the days to signal.")
Even in its condensed version of the much more detailed Mesopotamian texts, the Bible (Genesis 1: 14) expressed the triple relationship between Earth, Moon, and Sun as it applied to the cycles of day, month, year:
And the Lord said:
Let there be luminaries
in the hammered-out Heaven
to distinguish between the day and the night;
And let them be signs
for months and for days and for years.
The Hebrew term Mo' edim used here to denote months,
which signifies the ritual assembly called for on the evening of the New Moon, establishes the Moon's orbital period and phases as an integral component of the Mesopotamian-Hebrew calendar from its very inception. By listing the two luminaries (Sun and Moon) as responsible for the months and the days and the years, the complex lunar-solar nature of that calendar's antiquity is also presented. Over the millennia of Mankind's efforts to measure time by devising a calendar, some (as the Moslems continue to this day) have followed only the Moon's cycles; others (as the ancient Egyptians and the Common Era calendars in use in the Western world) have adopted the solar year, conveniently dividing it into months.
But the calendar devised about fifty-eight hundred years ago in Nippur (Sumer's religious center) and still adhered to by the Jews retained the biblically stated complexity of time-keeping based on the orbital relationship between the Earth and the two luminaries. In doing that, the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun was recognized by the term Shanah for year
which stems from the Sumerian shatu, an astronomical term meaning to course, to orbit,
and the full term Tekufath ha-Shanah—the circling or annual orbiting
to denote the passage of a full year.
Scholars have been puzzled by the fact that the Zo' har (The Book of Splendor), an Aramaic-Hebrew composition which is a central work in the literature of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. unmistakably explained—in the thirteenth century of the Christian era—that the cause of the day's changing into night was the turning of the Earth around its own axis. Some two hundred fifty years before Copernicus asserted that the day–night sequence resulted not from the Sun's circling of the Earth but from the Earth's turning on its own axis, the Zohar stated that The entire Earth spins, turning as a sphere. When one part is down the other part is up. When it is light for one part it is dark for the other part; when it is day for that, it is night for the other.
The Zohar's source was the third century Rabbi Hamnuna!
Though little known, the role of Jewish savants in transmitting astronomical knowledge to Christian Europe in the Middle Ages has been convincingly documented by extant books on astronomy, written in Hebrew and containing clear illustrations (as this one from a twelfth century book published in Spain, Fig. 3). Indeed, the writings of Ptolemy of Alexandria, known to the Western world as the Almagest, were first preserved by the Arab conquerors of Egypt in the eighth century and became available to Europeans through translations by Jewish scholars; significantly some of these translations contained commentaries casting doubt on the accuracy of the geocentric theories of Ptolemy centuries before Copernicus. Other such translations of Arabic and Greek works on astronomy, as well as independent treatises, were a main channel for the study of astronomy in medieval Europe. In the ninth and tenth centuries Jewish astronomers composed treatises on the movements of the Moon and the planets and calculated the paths of the Sun and the positions of the constellations. In fact, the compilation